Keyword Explorer is Now Live; Ask Me Anything About It!

[randfish]

Hi Gyorgy - you can use the old KW Difficulty tool, but the search volumes there aren't accurate for non-US either, and the difficulty scores are less accurate, too. I'd suggest using KW Explorer if you want all the other scores (those are accurate) and AdWords KW Planner in the meantime.

We're prioritizing UK, Canada, and Australia volume data very soon - hopefully will be in the product in the next 60 days.

[Gyorgy.B]

Perfect, I can survive that. Thank you!

PS: the kw difficulty search volume is closer to AdWords than the explorer's US search volume. In a Q&A post I mentioned a head term search volume which has 6-9k searches in AdWords and the kw difficulty tool but 118-300k in kw explorer

[randfish]

Yeah - some important things to keep in mind about volume in KWE:

1. It uses United States volume only right now (if you search by default in AdWords, you may be getting global search volume unless you choose "US")

2. It's modifying that data with actual clickstream numbers to give greater accuracy

3. It normalizes trend volume, so if Google has a big spike or dip, they'll show that one number, whereas KWE tries to estimate the monthly average data.

[chrwald]

Hey Rand,

from your blogpost regarding the launch of keyword explorer I got, that you guys are planing to retire the old keyword-diffuculty tool in favor of the new kw-explorer. On the other hand it is stated in that post and here as well, that the new explorer is - and for at least some more month will be - US and english language-centric.

After fiddling with it for a while I get more then > 90% "no data" for volume and many of the new difficulty scores don't make much sense to me (e.g. difficulty scores of < 5 for terms that got a score over >40 in the old tool).

That leads me to two questions:

• If the new tool is more precise than the old one and the differences in scores are that big: Was it either a terrible idea to use the old scores for decission making in the first place? Or could it be, that the new tool has still some difficulties when it comes to non-english languages or non-us-searches?

• Related to this: Why retire the old tool so quick if the new one is not an adequate alternative for folks like me yet?

Thanks, Christian

[randfish]

Hi Christian - can you send over some examples of Difficulty scores that were 40+ and are now <5. That seems very fishy and we can look into it.

In general, the new tool should be vastly more accurate and useful than the old one. Volume data in the old KW Difficulty tool comes from Grepwords, which we'll be using for non-US volume in the new tool as well, hopefully very soon, so you should see that fixed before the old KW Difficulty disappears.

[chrwald]

Hi Rand,

thank you for the quick reply. After looking into the data again, it seems like I have exaggerated a tiny bit. Here are some examples. One of them is old kwd 38, new kwd 4, another one is old kwd 46, new kwd 6. Technically not "40+ to <5" but pretty close and bad enough.

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[randfish]

Thanks @Chrwald - I'm going to ask Dr. Pete to take a look at these.

[Dr-Pete]

The new Difficulty score gets pretty aggressively scaled, because we found that the distribution of PA/DA was bunching up a bit, and fell almost entirely in the 25-85 range (looking across an entire SERP). So, a 25 gets scaled down to nearly zero, to give the new metric more granularity.

It looks like the CTR-adjusted PA for "Naturmode" on Google.de (for example) is right around 26, so it may be that the PAs have gone down a bit over time as well. Even by the non-weighted metric, I'd expect that to be a solid 10 points lower than the old difficulty score.

We're going to dig in and try to find out if the rescaling is too aggressive, once we have more data from real-world KWE usage. In general, though, you're going to see a bigger range of difficulty scores with the new metric. It's pretty tough to meaningfully compare the old and new scores.

[SureFire]

Hi Rand

Love the new KE tool! Great job.

I'm in New Zealand and like others out of the States I also found myself puzzled by the keyword volume estimate, but makes sense now you've clarified these are currently US volumes.

Can you please confirm that, whilst we should ignore the keyword volume estimates for non-US markets, the difficulty and opportunity scores are still applicable outside the US?

Cheers, Mark

[randfish]

Hi Mark - yes! If you're using the New Zealand select in the drop down for engines, those other scores should be accurate.

Cheers!

[Krithikam]

how to see the organic keywords that a website uses?

[randfish]

Unfortuntately, we don't have this feature yet in KW Explorer, but you can get it at SEMRush, Spyfu, Keycompete, Searchmetrics, and others. We hope to have this ability in the future.

[bhsiao]

I love the keyword tool for giving me direction and helping to prioritize. My question:

Once I have the prioritized keywords, do you recommend having a page for each of the top keywords, using the keyword as the page name? Or is it better to sprinkle the keywords into existing pages?

Thank you.

[Page1SEO]

Hi Rand,

With uploading keyword lists, does each keyword on the list count towards your 300 queries/month list? Ex: If I upload a list with 100 keywords on it, will I then only have 200 queries left for the month? Or is it 300 independent queries, and 3 lists regardless of size?

Thanks!

[randfish]

Each keyword you add to a list does count toward the 300 limit (or whatever limit your account has). That's because for each, we need to do a SERP crawl to get the metrics and analysis.

If you upload a list with 100 keywords, we'll do a data fetch for each, and you'll have 200 queries remaining for the month.

[Sigma_Digital]

Really loving the new tool, I have created keyword groups but I would like to know the accuracy especially in the UK.

When setting up a campaign there are options to monitor Google GB & Google UK, would using one or the other, or even both give different results for keywords?

[randfish]

Hi - thanks! Glad to hear it. As far as accuracy in the UK - the SERP data is accurate, but volume is still US-centric until we make some updates. Those should be happening relatively soon (next few months).

As far as UK vs. GB, I believe the rankings can be slightly different.

[randfish]

Thanks! Check out https://moz.com/blog/can-seos-stop-worrying-keywords-focus-topics-whiteboard-friday for more info on exactly that topic. Basically, I'd suggest targeting all the keywords that target the same searcher intent together on a page, and split up any that have different intent/search goals to different pages.

[ATP]

Rand,

I am a UK user.

I just went onto the keyword difficulty page and it said it is being removed from June 2nd to be replaced by the keyword explorer tool. Whilst I welcome this change as I love the keyword explorer, as a UK user i rely on the keyword difficulty tool for volume metrics as they keyword explorer doesn't yet show these for the UK.

Why the haste to remove this tool? Its a vital part of the puzzle for me until the explorer is fully operational. Could it not stick around until the explorer is fully functional?

Thanks

[randfish]

Hi ATP - we're working on getting the UK volume data (along with other countries) into KW Explorer, hopefully before we shut off KW Difficulty. I believe we may be extending that June 2nd deadline.

In the meantime, I'd recommend using AdWords' KW Tool and selecting "United Kingdom" in their country dropdown. KW Difficulty's data comes from there as well (via GrepWords).